solution

when selected it Windows claimed there was an error on the drive, but all this caused was to reboot several times, and roll back the changes

back in Ubuntu I checked dmesg

all this showed was a known AMD graphics card error, nowt to worry about,
or show what the hard drive issue was

next step was to check fstab to see if the partition was listed

had to force my way in: sudo nano /etc/fstab

here was my first clue, there were no deets listed for the partition in question

from the terminal I ran sudo blkid to find the relevant UUID

back in fstab I made the addition:#Entry for /dev/sd## :
UUID="HEX_CODE" /media/sd## ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_NZ.UTF-8 0 0

still no success, still not writable 🙁

refusing to give up, it was the wrong side of midnight, I pulled out the big guns with sudu su, and ran sudo chown -R 777 /media/sd##

returned by to the normal user to find all rights had been restored 🙂 …
although I haven’t booted Windows 10 as yet to see if there are any implications, but even if they are, I now know how to fix it 🙂

story

At the back end on January I finally got around to installing Windows 10, for the sole reason of the off chance that Elite: Dangerous may run better due to better drivers.

This turned out to be a fruitless task as I’d changed my controller setup without backing up the previous configuration… but that’s a story for another post.

What really messed me up was the shared drive, where I stash over 600 gigs of digital detritus collected over the years, was no longer writable in Ubuntu, only Windows 10.

The drive showed as root owned, although even with sudo commands I still couldn’t copy or save files to it. Bugger.

Trying several things with no luck, and yesterday having resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to move everything off of the partition, and format it to free back up the space. However I didn’t have enough space to duplicate all of this content, so I picked up another 2 terabyte hard disk drive for this task.

I thought I didn’t have the bits to connect the drive, so I worked through the solution above 🙂

Revisiting my local tech store todaye to pick up a SATA cable, and some way to mount the drive.

Back at the store later in the day [third time in 2 days; how hard is it to fit a harddrive 🙂 ] to return the SSD plate I had been given, as I found out they had no HDD housing, the sales agent didn’t bother to ask and just flogged me what was on the shelf.

A star, and gentleman, behind the service desk rummaged about for 10 mins to find me a bay, I’d swapped the SATA cable for one with a 90 degree connection to squeeze into my non oversized case… could I finally install this drive!?

Nope 🙂

The bay wouldn’t fit, and I had no spare SATA power connection.

At this point I had resigned myself to the fact that this drive wasn’t going to be fitted today… but I had an inkling of a memory that I’d stashed HDD case holders somewhere, and I don’t throw shit like that away… like I don’t delete files that I’ll probably never look at again, the irony isn’t lost on me that’s what I’m trying to preserve by this exercise 🙂

HDD holders were found in a zip locked bag, within a motherboard box, inside a plastic storage box, just where I’d left them 🙂

These fitted the drive perfectly, but I still had the issue of the SATA power supply.

As a temporary solution to this puzzle I pulled the SATA data cable and power connection from the optical drive; the only time I remember using this was using the Windows 7 disk for recovery, and I don’t need that any more.

So I now have a new shiny 2 terabyte hard drive, and I’ve write permission back to my original partition, success!

The drive I think I’ll use to actually install some other Linux distros, rather than run them solely within Virtual Box, and I’ll try and keep ownership of the shared drive going forward by sharing a 64 gig memory stick with Windows 10, rather than a physical drive.

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